Seeing Is Not Necessarily Recalling

A new study shows that people often do not recall things they have seen — or at least walked by — hundreds of times.

For the new study, researchers at the University of California-Los Angeles asked 54 people who work in the same building if they knew the location of the fire extinguisher nearest their office.

While many had worked in their offices for years and had passed the bright red extinguishers several times a day, only 13 out of the 54 — 24 percent — knew the location, the researchers report.

When asked to find a fire extinguisher, however, everyone was able to do so within a few seconds, the researchers add, noting there were no significant differences between men and women, or between older and younger adults.

“Just because we’ve seen something many times doesn’t mean we remember it or even notice it,” said Alan Castel, Ph.D., an associate professor of psychology at UCLA and lead author of the study.

“If I asked you to draw the front of a dime or the front of a dollar bill from memory, how well could you do that? You might get some elements right. Do you know who the president is? On the dime, is he facing left or right? Does it say ‘In God We Trust’ on the front of the dollar or the back? Do you know what else it says? You’ve seen it so many times, but you probably haven’t paid much attention to it.”

Castel said that not noticing things isn’t necessarily bad, particularly when those things are not important in your daily life. “It might be a good thing not to burden your memory with information that is not relevant to you,” he said.

But with safety information, such as knowing where fire extinguishers are or what to do in an emergency, that information can be life-saving, the researcher said.

“When you’re on an airplane, do you know where the life vest is and what to do in the event of an emergency?” Castel said. “You’ve been told many times, but how would you respond under stressful conditions, when there could be smoke and people screaming?”

A few months after being asked the location of the nearest fire extinguisher, the study participants were asked again if they knew where the closest one was. This time all of them knew.

“We don’t notice something if we’re attending to something else,” Castel said. “Fire extinguishers are bright red and very conspicuous, but we’re almost blind to them until they become relevant.”

This information can be beneficial when training, whether for emergencies or something less life-threatening, like learning a new computer program, he continued, claiming that making errors during training is useful. Like during the fire extinguisher exercise, errors — or simple oversights — can teach us that we don’t know something well and need to pay more attention in order to remember it, he explained.

“It’s good if errors happen during training and not during an event where you need the information,” he said. “That’s part of the learning process.”

The study was published in the journal Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics.

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About Janice Wood

Janice Wood is a long-time writer and editor who began working at a daily newspaper before graduating from college. She has worked at a variety of newspapers, magazines and websites, covering everything from aviation to finance to healthcare.